Google Bard, the AI-powered tool that can generate text based on a given topic, has announced that it now supports Swahili, its first African language. Swahili is spoken by about 100 million people in East and Central Africa, and is the official language in a dozen counties and the National language of Tanzania and Kenya.
Swahili is also spoken in countries like Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Mozambique. You can also find Swahili in Comoros, Djibouti, Rwanda, Somalia, and Zambia. It is also one of the official languages of the African Union.
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“We’re excited that this is Bard’s largest expansion to date – we see its global availability as a great democratizer of knowledge,”
Dorothy Ooko, Head of Communications and Public Affairs, SSA, Google.
Google Bard, like ChatGPT, is a web-based application that allows users to enter a few words or sentences as a prompt, and then generates a longer text based on the prompt. Users can choose from different formats, such as blog posts, stories, poems, lyrics, essays and more. Users can also adjust the tone, length and creativity of the generated text.
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According to Google, adding Swahili to Bard was a challenging but rewarding task. Swahili is a complex language with many dialects, idioms and cultural references. Google used a large corpus of Swahili texts from various sources, such as books, newspapers, websites and social media, to train its neural network model. Google also collaborated with local experts and linguists to ensure the accuracy and quality of the generated texts.
“The launch of Bard in Swahili is a major milestone as it allows Bard to reach even more people in Africa, where approximately 150 million people speak Swahili3. This makes Bard more accessible to everyone in the region, and we believe that it has the potential to be a powerful tool for creativity and learning4. We are excited to see how people in the region use Bard to explore their ideas and discover new things.”
Advertisement - Continue reading belowRachael Ndichu, Language Manager at Google
Google Bard aims to inspire and assist users in their creative writing endeavors. Google hopes that by supporting Swahili, it will enable more people in Africa to express themselves and share their stories with the world.
Google also plans to add more African languages to Bard in the future. Here’s to even more access to the future tools of work.
